Hypnotic illusions at the Wikileaks Show

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/28/wikileaks/print.html 

Hypnotic illusions at the Wikileaks Show

Greasepaint - check. Factoids - check.

By Andrew Orlowski (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)

Posted in Music and Media, 28th July 2010 13:05 GMT

Analysis There's a theatrical quality to the publication of the Wikileaks
Afghan logs that's quite at odds with what they contain. You'll recall that
Wikileaks obtained a large number of classified field reports from US forces
in Afghanistan and gave three media outlets, the New York Times, Der Spiegel
and the Guardian, advanced copies of a small portion of the material, before
publishing on Monday.

We're told that they're sensational, but this mundane and arcane collection
of scraps of information has landed with a thud: it doesn't really tell us
anything we didn't already know. Yet everyone involved has a role to play,
and is hamming it up to the full. The oohs and aahs wouldn't be out of place
at a WWE Smackdown, or a Christmas panto. Something feels not quite right
here, but what is it?


The star actor and media manipulator is undoubtedly Wikileaks founder Julian
Assange himself. Assange plays the part of "master hacker" and "international
fugitive" - cliches at home in an airport thriller. But recall that the
template is Cryptome [1], a site operated by New York architect John Young
for 15 years. Young doesn't appear to need Assange's theatrical garb - such
as never staying in the same location for two nights, requiring cryptography,
and changing his number and email constantly. Young's name and address are
prominent on his website, and haven't changed for 15 years. Young has
arguably has far more to lose than Assange. So the fugitive role Assange
adopts is a lifestyle choice, and not a necessity. Nor does Young feel the
need to become part of the story himself: he doesn't do vanity PR: press
conferences or proclamations are not the Cryptome style. On Cryptome, you
come and get it. And crucially, you then work out whether it's genuine or
not, and how important it may be.

"Assange is a master at hiding his assets and providing hypnotic illusions,"
notes Young.

The Guardian has devoted as much space to how it processed the story, as to
the story itself - which is usually a warning bell that the news content
might actually be quite thin. Another warning bell is that the story has
dried up by day three. Nevertheless, having hyped up Assange for weeks, the
paper now gets to trumpet its prowess at obtaining the forbidden - when
really, it's been hand-picked by the media manipulator. It looks
uncomfortably similar to "churnalism", the term that one of the skeleton team
processing the files, Nick Davies, coined in his book Flat Earth News. This
illustrates less of an analytical capability than a skill at buttering up a
single source.

Ailing newspapers have their own reasons for buying into the Wikileaks
circus, of course. And the last month has sent the Assange publicity machine
at the Graun into overdrive: [Profile [2] - Profile [3] - Award [4] - Profile
[5] - Profile [6] - Live blog [7] - er, Jemima [8]].

The Guardian was scooped by the Telegraph with its expenses scandal and the
newspaper's financial position is more precarious than the other ailing
broadsheets. Its top investigative reporters such as David Hencke and David
Pallister have taken voluntary redundancy - it's really down to a skeleton
crew of just two, and it's outsourcing its IT operations. You can be forgiven
for thinking that the Wikileaks relationship is another form of outsourcing -
with the fizz of the 'glamour' provided by Assange making up for the brains
cupboard looking rather bare.

But none of this has stopped the Guardian - unlike Der Spiegel or the New
York Times - from suggesting that it's pioneering a new form of journalism:
"data-driven journalism [9]", no less.

I find it odd that disclosure in itself has become a kind of performance. And
I use the word 'performance' carefully, because performance is a kind of
artifice. While all journalists love to obtain forbidden or secret documents,
these don't become a substitute for the primary job in hand, which is
explaining the world, and this is performed by the journalist. It requires
analytical skills at both ends of the chain - with the reader also making
rational choices, and joining the dots. Leaks typically provide the seed for
a scoop, maybe a great scoop, but they don't join the dots. As many
commenters have pointed out since Monday, The Afghan Logs is a subset of
(apparently) 90,000 documents which don't really tell us anything new. They
shed no new light on strategic motives, or even tactical alliances. By
comparing the Wikileaks logs to the Pentagon Papers, our intelligence is
being insulted.

Information isn't knowledge Part of the problem is the weight given to
"information" itself. In the Wikileaks Show, facts are a strange kind of
stuff that almost appears to come from another planet; a luminous substance.
This is quite similar to how a conspiracy theorist treats information. For a
conspiracy theorist, a factoid is emblematic, it's a cypher: it represents
and stands-in for a wide set of power relationships. In the real world, these
are much more complex and contradictory. By hyping a collection of factoids,
the Logs become quite symbolic. They foreclose the analysis we must perform
as readers.

The only journalist to explicitly highlight this problem is Brendan O'Neill,
who points out [10] that the Wikileaks Show leaves us feeling a bit thicker
and more poorly informed than before:

"Truth becomes, not something we find out through critical study and
investigation, but something we are handed by external forces b& this is Truth
as a religious-style revelation rather than Truth as the endpoint of thought,
interrogation, question-asking, analysis. In reality, it is only through
actively engaging with the world and its problems, through gathering facts
and objectively analysing and organising them, that we can arrive at any
Truth worth its name," he writes.

The journalist Claud Cockburn, who created the foreign policy scandalsheet
The Week in the 1930s that later became the model for Private Eye, and many
others, made a similar point many years ago, in his memoir A Discord of
Trumpets. Cockburn wrote:

"To hear people talking about facts you would think that they lay about like
pieces of gold in the Yukon days, waiting to be picked up - arduous it is
true, but still definitely visible - by strenuous prospectors whose
subsequent problem was only how to get them to market. Such a view is
evidently and dangerously naive".

Cockburn's point - and do read it in his own words [11] - was that stories
began with a subjective point of view, around which the facts were organised.
This idea of the journalist as a flawed medium was heresy, and perhaps
upsetting, Cockburn recognized - but it was healthier, as it implied a
rational, critical audience and demanded a plurality of "views":

"One was reminded of the atheistic young man who has told the believer that
he would never believe anything he could not understand, to which the
believer replied, 'Young man, your beliefs are likely to be small.'"

The internet has made concealment of information much harder, and that's
good. I'm not knocking the information distribution system Assange has
created. But in the face of this, power doesn't simply keel over and admit
defeat. And Assange may simply have invented a new form of concealment - the
information disclosed is both edited and highly selective.

The nature of news and journalism hasn't really changed. We want the world
explained, the dots joined, and factoids are a poor substitute, no matter how
sensational the trappings. We know that information isn't knowledge, and
sometimes barely causes a ripple.

(Young weighs into the Wikileaks-Media relationship here [12] - it's a
must-read.) B.